Electronic Book Review - toxichttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/toxic
enReview of Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Selfhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/punk
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
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<div class="field-item even">John Bruni</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-09-14</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Pay close attention to the book’s cover art, Fawaz AlOlaiwat’s “Toxic Girl.”<cite class="note" id="note_1">The artwork can be viewed at <a href="http://fawazo.com/portfolio_mod/toxic-girl/">http://fawazo.com/portfolio_mod/toxic-girl/</a></cite> A tattooed female with rifle belts across her chest glares at us, a figure rendered in hot pink and set against a lime green background. It reminds me of the cover art of a punk rock record, angry and apocalyptic. Perhaps, even, a comment on how environmentalists might embrace a punk aesthetic: a loud and noisy negation of the overly positive thinking pumped out by the advertising industry that encourages us to “feel good” by over-consuming, to the eventual detriment of the planet and ourselves. Punk rock, after all, has long been (in)famous for offering resistance to dominant cultural values in as shocking a manner as possible, by satirically celebrating disposability and trash in consumer society, by providing vitriolic commentary on the ways that self- and environmental destruction go hand in hand.</p>
<p>Apparently, the book’s cover has a similar effect. Seeing it on my desk amidst a pile of (yet to be graded) student papers, a colleague remarked that the artwork disturbed her. And I think that is the intent, for the cover to depict Stacy Alaimo’s provocative thesis: the “traffic in toxins” can - and must - change our thinking about bodies (human and non-human) and the environments they inhabit (18).</p>
<p>Just as punk rock’s D.I.Y. ethos, moreover, collapses distinctions between performer and audience, Alaimo questions the separation of theory and practice. What has been for me a welcome development, ecocritics moving towards, rather than away from, theoretical models of an environmental ethics, is taken up in the book with admirable force and energy, as she shows why the theories of Karen Barad and Ulrich Beck are crucial for enabling environmental activism.</p>
<p>Barad proposes that there is not a subject, endowed with agency, set apart from the environment; rather, her insistence that matter itself is active, not passive, denotes an “agential” material world where “things, as such, do not precede their intra-actions” (21). Beck suggests that we all live in a “risk society” where the absolute probability of harm to us cannot be easily calculated. The implications of Barad and Beck’s theories for an environmental ethics unwind over the course of the book. It seems to me that Alaimo reads Barad and Beck in quite opposite (but equally thoughtful) ways. Barad’s complicated ideas about materiality, it turns out, have rather simple, but significant consequences, for, due to what Alaimo calls trans-corporeality, human bodies and non-human natures are open to one another - thus what we do to the environment (such as pollute the soil, water, and air), we do to ourselves. Conversely, her innovative reading of Beck’s risk society, an idea somewhat easier to grasp, develops into a complex critique of scientific/cultural knowledge production. As part of her critique, she instigates an important conversation about what the idea of environmental justice really is - and what it can be. If we are not sure to what degree what we do to the environment harms us, how can we develop a tenable ethical stance, much less a plan for political, social, and/or legal action against environmentally irresponsible corporations? How do we address the paradox that while all are at risk, some are at more risk (for example, due to environmental racism, that is, the failure to address the disparate exposure of minority communities to toxins) than others?</p>
<p>Such questions, in concert with the image of Toxic Girl and trans-corporeality, do more than usefully shake up our complacency (as if we still had that) about environmental issues; they strike at the very heart of what we know about ourselves. Alaimo elaborates,</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he pursuit of self-knowledge, which has been a personal philosophical, psychological, or discursive matter, now extends into a rather ‘scientific’ investigation into the constitution of our coextensive environments. Science, however, offers no steady ground, as the information may be biased, incomplete, or opaque and the ostensible object of scientific inquiry-the material world-is extremely complex, overwrought with agencies, and ever emergent. (20)</p>
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<p>From her perspective, bodies can neither be reduced to discursive constructions, nor essential(ist) “beings.” Her introductory chapter pressures the inability to take seriously the natural environment as matter(ing), which, as she points out, is endemic to feminist theory and its influence on cultural studies, for, “feminist theory’s most revolutionary concept - the concept of gender, as distinct from biological sex - is predicated upon a sharp opposition of nature and culture” (5). She finds that even more recent “models of materiality” nevertheless may reinstall the division between humans and non-human natures (9). That bodies are active matter and do not exist before or beyond the material relations with their environments comprises the starting point for the book’s analysis of the literature, science, and popular culture of late-twentieth-century environmental health and justice movements.</p>
<p>Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins’s “proletarian lung” is a striking example of trans-corporeality that defines how bodies, and their parts, are historically connected to the social realm. Under the modern regime of capitalism, Alaimo insightfully points out, workers do “possess” their own bodies, and, yet, their bodies become displaced through the struggle of making visible the physical signs of their oppression, as they become subject to the gaze of “experts in medicine, law, ‘industrial hygiene,’ occupational health, insurance claims, and union organizing” (28). The second chapter, “Eros and X-rays,” focuses on Meridel Le Sueur’s writings and Muriel Rukeyser’s <span class="booktitle">The Book of the Dead</span>, tracing the repressive political control over nature and labor and the subsequent beginnings of the environmental justice movement in the early twentieth century. Alaimo examines Le Sueur’s working-class politics through recurring images of humans joined with the earth as a critique of and resistance to capitalist exploitation. While she notes Le Sueur’s challenge to gender tropes in her vision of a masculine nature and feminine desire, Alaimo comments that Le Sueur’s “enthusiasm for a kind of maternal, proletarian vitality betrays exactly the sort of essentialism that mires the (reproductive) female body within the relentless fecundity of nature” (38). That said, Alaimo’s close reading of Le Sueur’s article, “Women Know a Lot of Things,” extends the power of the proletarian lung to transform the female body into a biological newspaper where the rise and fall of wheat on the stock market can be read: an instance of a direct engagement with matter.</p>
<p>The difference between Le Sueur and Rukeyser is that, for the former, interactions between workers and the environment are positive, and their imprints are easily recognizable on bodies; for the latter, the case is the opposite. Rukeyser’s poem sequence addresses the 1930 Hawk’s Nest tunnel tragedy in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where workers, mostly African-American migrants, without their knowledge or approval, were exposed to silica dust. The scandal, whereby an unknown number of workers died from silicosis of the lungs, was covered up for eighteen months, the workers and their survivors never receiving relief or compensation even after national hearings.<cite class="note" id="note_2">What intensifies the scandal, from an environmental activist view, is that the tunnel was a crucial part of a “dam that would not provide electricity for local people but instead power the electrometallurgical complex in the town of Alloy,” a town that Union Carbide, the company that instigated the project, “owned” (45).</cite> Experimental in style, incorporating “scientific, medical, and legal evidence,” the poems show how medical technology, in particular, the use of X-rays, could be used to both discriminate against workers (by dismissing those who were diagnosed with silicosis) and provide evidence for their court cases (45). As Alaimo explains, the negative effects of trans-corporeality are staged in a landscape of widespread risk, yet she sees an opposition between human justice and environmental justice: <span class="booktitle">The Book of the Dead</span> remains unconcerned about the non-human animals affected by the construction.</p>
<p>Currently, risk society is underscored by how environmental activists move beyond “everyday” knowledge bases to appropriating sophisticated technologies and sciences for detecting “invisible” environmental hazards such as toxins and radioactivity. Throughout the book, we glimpse how risk promotes the crossing of disciplinary and institutional barriers. As science edges closer to social activism, this crossing, Alaimo writes, questions that science is an “objective, separate sphere of knowledge making” and provides “an opportunity to transform science into something more accountable, more just, and more democratic” (65).</p>
<p>The book’s third chapter, “Invisible Matters,” looks at literary and activist narratives that dramatize the transformation of science. Alaimo views realistically the challenges activists face; as she puts it earlier, “there is a pervasive sense of disconnection that casts ‘environmental issues’ as containable, eccentric, dismissible topics” (16). She brings out how novels, such as Percival Endicott’s <span class="booktitle">Watershed</span> and Ana Castillo’s <span class="booktitle">So Far from God</span>, memorably raise the stakes for debates about environmental health and justice. Structured both as an “environmental justice mystery” and a western, with a standoff at the end between the FBI and Native Americans, <span class="booktitle">Watershed</span> features David Hawks, a black hydrologist, who discovers that a polluted creek endangers a Native American community (65). He then becomes an activist, which links him with his grandfather, a physician who secretly treated a Black Panther’s gunshot wound: “Hawk’s rather solitary, scientific, yet physically heroic action - he escapes from the armed standoff, hiking through the mountains to deliver evidence of the crime to an environmental organization - echoes the solitary heroic acts of his grandfather” (67). The postmodern narrative, full of random disruptions, stages the “real” danger, a secret U.S. army anthrax dump, as unexpected, yet implying the threat has been there all along. As Alaimo comments, Hawks therefore has likely been exposed to anthrax in a “landscape of trans-corporeality, where people and place are substantially interconnected” (68). Non-human animals also figure into the landscape: seeing a dead elk just before finding the dump, Hawks dreams of becoming that elk and connects with its suffering. Thinking about the anthrax that might be in his own blood impels us to consider the larger associations among blood as an image of racial identity, as a historic marker of racial discrimination (Endicott references the syphilis experiments on black men in Tuskegee), as a signifier of violence and environmental racism.</p>
<p>Like the narrative disruption in <span class="booktitle">Watershed</span> staged by the anthrax dump, in <span class="booktitle">So Far from God</span>, the treatment of Fe’s death departs from the novel’s magical realism (she is not resurrected, like her sisters, and vanishes from the story). While her husband comically starts making a sheep-like noise (a trans-corporeal indicator of the family heritage as sheepherders), Fe chases the capitalist dream in industrial society, gets promoted for her work ethic, and dies from cancer caused by unknowingly handling toxic chemicals (but not before solving the “mystery” of why she is dying). Her tragedy is treated as environmental injustice rather than as an industrial accident, because like magical realism (which is both real and unreal), so is envisioning risk. And, like Hawks, Fe undertakes environmental detective work to determine that the risk has been there all along, but, unlike Hawks, she has potentially harmed the environment by pouring the chemicals down the drain, which more than likely has polluted the community water supply.</p>
<p>By now, we realize that risk is both socially complex and intensely personal. Yet the tendency persists to view risk as exclusively a matter of self-survival. Take, for example, “green living” campaigns which, in reality, hold people “responsible for threats they cannot possibly subdue” (92).5 The fourth chapter, “Material Memoirs,” looks at those who write about health threats, from their own experiences, in order to make a collective call for environmental activism. Alaimo’s discussion of Sandra Steingraber’s <span class="booktitle">Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment</span> sheds light on the difficulty of becoming a “citizen-expert,” for, even as a scientist, Steingraber finds it arduous to glean “reliable scientific data” from mountains of documents (97). To Alaimo, self-determining how toxins in the body got there, by, say, visiting a dairy farm is not a “look back toward origins”; instead, it is an avowal of “an environmental ethic that understands world and self to be coextensive” (98). This avowal, though, admits the difficulty of establishing a one to one correspondence between toxin(s) and disease, because bodies are so interconnected with their environments. The desire to be “knowers” rather than “objects of knowledge” separates writers, such as Steingraber, from the mass media versions of material memoirs: citing the environmentalist theme in the October 2006 issue of <span class="booktitle">National Geographic</span>, Alaimo observes a disturbing passivity in the portrayal of those affected by toxic chemicals in economically impoverished and politically disempowered regions (107-09).</p>
<p>Detailed in the fifth chapter, “Deviant Agents,” the effort to remain an active knower is the most challenged in the controversial case of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), because what it is and how it might be contacted has been hotly contested. While here the uncertainty of risk reaches the highest levels, MCS, as Alaimo reminds us, forcefully depicts trans-corporeality, since “chemically reactive people” suggest that “material entanglements-no matter how small or seemingly benign” should be taken into account (130). For instance, she references Jacob B. Berkson’s <span class="booktitle">A Canary’s Tale</span>, a self-published account of struggling with MCS, that depicts a shared environmental relationship with insects targeted by pesticides.<cite class="note" id="note_3">Alaimo points out that accounts of MCS are disseminated by non-traditional media outlets, since companies, such as pesticide manufacturers, that are complicit in environmental illness cases, have lobbied to restrict the spread of information about MCS through more mainstream channels.</cite> Alaimo’s nuanced analysis of Todd Hayne’s <span class="filmtitle">Safe</span> revisits her critique of environmental self-reliance, exposing “the New Age psychobabble in which patients are led to blame themselves-not the toxins, not the lax government regulations, not the industries-for their illness” (137). Rather than self-help platitudes, the film promotes the “deviant agency” of “lived” bodies that differs from “both the ableist norms of the dominant culture and the New Age spiritualism of the Wrenwood subculture” (138).</p>
<p>According to Alaimo, the prior chapters in the book “dramatize that one of the central problematics of trans-corporeality is contending with dangerous, often imperceptible material agencies” (146). The final-and most intriguing-chapter posits that, viewed in a more favorable light, material agencies are crucial for setting the latest incarnation of the trans-corporeal, the posthuman, against “genetic fetishism,” a belief in “techno-scientific mastery of all life forms” (150). To support her critique of genetic engineering as a catch-all remedy for environmental risk, she demonstrates how Greg Bear’s science fiction novels, <span class="booktitle">Darwin’s Radio</span> and <span class="booktitle">Darwin’s Children</span>, downplay the gene as a universal determinant of life, instead wrapping within their narratives multiple (and competing) origin stories that feature a proto-Darwinist human ancestor, the role of non-human bacteria in creating life, and a mysterious SHEVA virus that creates a new posthuman species, “virus children,” through female human bodies. The novels project Alaimo’s discussion into a speculative future, where now there is incontrovertible evidence that “humans are always already ‘other’ ” (155), our alien-ation performed through the enfolding of “various ‘natures’ within the human” (156).</p>
<p>Re-viewing the book’s cover, Toxic Girl seems to me a close relative of Bear’s “virus children,” who lead the way for “an ethics that is not circumscribed by the human but is instead accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of our selves and others” (158). What Alaimo calls a “posthuman environmental ethics” resonates with Cary Wolfe’s proposal for the academic rethinking of our shared relationships with nonhuman animals: “one can engage in a humanist or posthumanist practice of a discipline, and that fact is crucial to what a discipline can contribute to the field of animal studies” (123). As Alaimo convincingly argues, to make the posthuman matter, in/as disciplinary practice, requires us to make matter matter. It requires us to regard the idea of our being alone in the universe as nothing short of delusional.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Wolfe, Cary. <span class="booktitle">What Is Posthumanism?</span> Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alaimo">Alaimo</a>, <a href="/tags/science">science</a>, <a href="/tags/environment">environment</a>, <a href="/tags/environmentalism">environmentalism</a>, <a href="/tags/body-0">body</a>, <a href="/tags/bodily">bodily</a>, <a href="/tags/bodies">bodies</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/post-human-0">post-human</a>, <a href="/tags/posthumanism">posthumanism</a>, <a href="/tags/trans-corporeal">trans-corporeal</a>, <a href="/tags/trans-corporeality">trans-corporeality</a>, <a href="/tags/ethic">ethic</a>, <a href="/tags/ethics">ethics</a>, <a href="/tags/punk">punk</a>, <a href="/tags/diy">D.I.Y.</a>, <a href="/tags/memoir">memoir</a>, <a href="/tags/toxins">toxins</a>, <a href="/tags/toxic">toxic</a>, <a href="/tags/pollution">pollution</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1376 at http://electronicbookreview.comFinding the Human in "the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world": Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natureshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/bodily
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
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<div class="field-item even">Veronica Vold</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-09-07</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Stacy Alaimo’s <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> articulates a vigorous posthuman environmental ethic for negotiating the dangers of our 21st century risk society. Building on the risk theory of Ulrich Beck, the “intra-active” vision of material life developed by Karen Barad, and models of academic hybridity advanced by Bruno Latour, <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> poses an optimistic intervention in the field of toxic discourse by analyzing critical entanglements of body and place. Alaimo’s ultimate achievement is the synthesis of so many diverse, yet mutually reliant fields in her pursuit of what it means to be human when risks to the body are inseparable from risks to the environments around it. Theories of the embodiment as explored in ecofeminism, science studies, and disability studies each contribute to Alaimo’s central theoretical tool of trans-corporality, a concept that recognizes the perpetual flow between the body and the active materiality of place. When microscopic toxins collect in the lungs of migrant African-American workers and in the West Virginian air, and run in the blood of well-heeled white housewives and in the roots of their suburban lawns, traditional assumptions of the human as separate and closed off from nature no longer hold. Analyzing trans-corporeal bodies and places as represented in early 20th century erotic poetry, civil rights histories, environmental histories, memoir, photography, film, fiction, and environmental justice literature, Alaimo shows that humanity and nonhuman nature are in fact coextensive: “the human is always the very stuff of the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world” (11). Alaimo argues that conceptualizing the human as embedded within a dynamic, reciprocal relationship with nonhuman nature enables readers to develop ethical positions on environmental problems that require new methods of holding political systems accountable for toxic exposure. <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> convincingly demonstrates how scholars, activists, and ordinary experts might respond to environmental risks by recognizing the material agency of our own bodies caught up in the active enfolding of the world.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> extends Alaimo’s argument for a trans-corporeal ethic as put forth in her 2008 essay, “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In this earlier work, which first appeared in the collection, <span class="booktitle">Material Feminisms</span>, co-edited by Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Alaimo posits that “a material, trans-corporeal ethics would turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences for multiple peoples, species, and ecologies” (253). To loosen the idealized, bounded individual into a more realistic, permeable concept of the posthuman, “Trans-corporeal Feminisms” argues that feminism and environmental scholarship must work together to reject humanistic domination and mastery over human and nonhuman life. Trans-corporeality as explored in <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> deepens this interdisciplinary call as it “opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (<span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> 2). Alaimo doesn’t mean for trans-corporeality to act as “some sort of rarefied, new theoretical invention,” but as a concept that works across traditionally separate fields to expose alliances between human and nonhuman life at risk from toxic exposure (3). Alaimo argues that a truly environmental trans-corporeal ethic must recognize the moral stakes of nonhuman animal life, as the ecological thinking of environmentalism rejects the sovereignty and closed individualism of traditional humanism. Trans-corporeality is thus both an imagining of the human as radically open to the concerns of nonhuman nature, as well as a theoretical position that enmeshes academic disciplines in advancing mutual environmental concerns.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> unfolds in six comprehensive chapters that offer close readings of trans-corporeality as it emerges in traditional and new media. Following the text’s introduction, which succinctly defines the critical stakes of interdisciplinary scholarship about environmental dangers in risk culture, Alaimo devotes two chapters to explore the tension between socially and materially discursive bodies, and the role science studies plays in shaping this tension. <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> thus joins the recent material turn in poststructuralist theory to account for the experience of the body as codeterminate with the social forces that construct human experience. Alaimo aims to show how textual performances of the trans-corporeal body inspire ethical action, and her persuasive readings of a range works from poetry to film to activist websites seek to endow social and linguistic theory with flesh. She contends that unless the body is understood as materially as well as socially constructed, feminist and critical race scholars bracket the political connections between peoples and places that might otherwise inspire us to resolve 21st century risks. Alaimo wants to reconfigure the valuable feminist axiom, “the personal is political,” as, “the political is not merely personal,” but always interrelated with all life (124). As her text ruptures “ordinary knowledge practices” and assumptions about the human being as a closed creature, Alaimo also aims to center her work firmly in the political discourse of environmental justice (17). By reframing the materiality of the human as codeterminate with social forces, <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> succeeds in defining the body’s materiality not as inert or formless matter, or the empty substance molded by social forces, but as an active and compelling force in its own right.</p>
<p>Alaimo argues that the racialized body, that is, the body as constructed by systems of language and the social superstructures that advance racial oppression, is codetermined by environmental factors that surround, permeate, and interact with the body. Following Latour’s argument that nature and culture, because they are at once joined and distinctive, are reciprocally transformative, Alaimo suggests that scholars must account for the trans-corporeal exchanges that shape the meaning of race, rather than exclusively focus on the effects of social forces. While pursuing social theories of the racial body is vital work, “environmental justice science, literature, and activism must to some degree focus on actual bodies, especially as they are transformed by their encounters with places, substances, and forces” (61). For Alaimo, socially discursive bodies are always already material, active and tangible. The meaning of race is sociobiological to the extent that environmental flows touch real skin and bone and tangibly damage human and environmental health, often disproportionately among people of color. To demonstrate how the materiality of racialized bodies participates in the larger toxic discourse of environmental concerns, Alaimo analyzes Muriel Rukeyser’s 1936 poem, “The Book of the Dead”, a work that folds “scientific, medical, and legal evidence into a literary form” (45). Rukeyser’s work exposes the “hazardous trans-corporeality” of the Hawk’s Nest Incident, in which a West Virginian construction firm exposed 3,000 African-American migrant workers to lethal amounts of silica dust (45). Alaimo argues that Rukeyser’s poem maps “an ontology in which the body of the worker, the river, the silica, the ‘natural,’ and the industrial environment are simultaneously material and social,” ultimately constituting a “trans-corporeal landscape” (48). By investigating trans-corporeality in Rukeyser’s work, Alaimo shows how the embodied data of toxicity lends itself to a trans-corporeal ethic. Rukeyser’s poem imagines the journey of microscopic glass as it fills and shreds African-American lungs and appears in autopsies of the dead that surviving families demand. Tracking and proving the movement of silica becomes key evidence in holding the construction firm accountable for failing to safeguard human health. Rukeyser enacts the interdisciplinary work of joining science and the humanities that Alaimo seeks to valorize in <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> as the poet weaves scientific ethos into her epic poem. By scrutinizing Rukeyser’s use of the scientific data of those injured and killed by the construction company’s neglect, Alaimo critiques the ethical uncertainty of using human bodies as ghastly monitors of toxic risks in industrial life. Alaimo’s analysis of an environmental racism that is as materially embodied as it is socially constructed allows her to put pressure on the scientific ethos that might hold larger political systems accountable for toxic exposure, a critique she deepens in subsequent chapters on fiction and memoir that explore environmental illness and toxic exposure.</p>
<p>Disability studies is deeply invested in the tension between socially discursive bodies and real material agency, and Alaimo assembles critical claims from prominent disability scholars to engage this tension in chapters on material memoir and environmental illness. Drawing on the scholarship of Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Tobin Siebers, and Simi Linton, Alaimo argues that because disabled bodies contradict any purely social or material category, disability studies has much to offer a trans-corporeal environmental ethic. Alaimo cites Garland-Thompson’s definition of disability as the particular intersection of body and place to show how this definition of disability anticipates her own model of trans-corporeality: “Disability studies reminds us that all bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception. We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies. The changes that occur when body encounters world are what we call disability” (Garland-Thompson qtd in <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> 12). Yet while this clear resonance suggests promising correlation between disability studies and trans-corporeality, rather than elaborate on the significance of an environmental humanities that incorporates disability studies, Alaimo positions the correlation as a call for future interdisciplinary work. <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> particularizes the contribution trans-corporeality might make to disability studies in specific instances of memoir and first person narrative, yet Alaimo relies on broad strokes to show how “disability studies may be enriched by attending not only to the ways in which built environments constitute or exacerbate ‘disability,’ but to how materiality, at a less perceptible level - that of pharmaceuticals, xenobiotic chemicals, air pollution, etc. - affects human health and ability” (12). Indeed, this is <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span>’ most unrelenting challenge to readers: Alaimo’s eloquent explanation for the need for more interdisciplinary scholarship often gestures toward further analysis of particular interdisciplinary relationships, such the relationship between the environmental humanities and disability studies, or the connection between animality and food studies, which often leaves us wanting more explicit and thorough conclusions. Yet the inspiration for further work validates the text’s rich accumulation of claims and questions. <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> throws a broad critical net, and invites passionate scholars to pursue more deeply the glittering analytical intersections caught in its ropes. Alaimo deliberately poses more complex questions than definitive answers about these intersections, demanding that readers enter the ethical debate that the risks of toxic discourse require.</p>
<p>While Alaimo most expressly discusses the creation of a posthuman environmental ethic in the text’s final chapter on Greg Bear’s science fiction, her strongest case for trans-corporeality as an ethical catalyst for environmental justice emerges in her critique of the traditional medical model of the body. Bear’s science fiction offers a meaningful model of trans-corporeality in that it evokes a posthuman life that may “suggest an environmental ethic that begins from the movement across - across time, across place, across species, across bodies, across scale - and reconfigures the human as a site of emergent material intra-actions inseparable from the very stuff of the rest of the world” (156). Yet Alaimo’s moving critique of the medical model of the body as it operates in memoir, autobiography, and in multi-media portraits of people living environmental illness offers a trans-corporeality that slides directly into the contemporary intra-actions between body and place. In these two chapters, Alaimo explores the origins of illness in the microenvironments of the body that flow with the life beyond the body, often resulting in confusing and unpredictable symptoms that confound accepted medical assumptions. Alaimo’s close readings of photography, film, and autobiography pose a vital resistance to the contemporary medical models of health as purely determined by one’s genes. In these fluid, generically diverse texts and images, a trans-corporeal posthuman ethic takes root that denies the fetishism of genetics and embraces the shared systems of reciprocity between all life.</p>
<p>For so many people living with environmental illness (EI) or multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), electronic literature provides vital resources about dangerous chemicals, their bodily effects, and their possible treatments that contemporary medical discourse fails to recognize. As “medical models of bounded human bodies make no sense for MCS, since the body is not separable from the environment,” everyday researchers dedicated to developing new models of the body must synthesize available information from mainstream medical discourse with alternative resources (124). These resources include online literatures that detail evidence of toxic risk, as well as print media like MCS autobiographies and first person accounts of EI. Such electronic literatures enact Alaimo’s ethic of trans-corporeality as these sites gather scientific, personal, and public data and experiences into new bodies knowledge that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. For example, Alaimo shows how the informative site for PBS’s televised documentary about toxic exposure and human health, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/">Trade Secrets</a>, links to activist website <a class="outbound" href="http://scorecard.goodguide.com/">Scorecard: The Pollution Information Website</a>, which enables users to search for the presence of environmental toxins by zip code. The <a class="outbound" href="http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/">Trade Secrets</a> website also links to a 37,000-page archive of chemical industry documents assembled by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a group that also operates the Human Toxome Project’s “Mapping the Pollution in People.” Links to this project provide users with a catalogue of particular toxicants found in human bodies all over the world. The project couples this chemical data with detailed portraits of real people who have tested positive for various toxicants and chemicals. Alaimo argues that such electronic literatures combine scientific data, medical narratives, and political calls to action to provide new practice of meaning-making for ordinary experts to use in the effort to remap the human body as coextensive with the rest of the world.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> is not only a strident appeal for interdisciplinary research in the environmental humanities; the text is a passionate call for principled engagement with the problems of environmental racism, environmental illness, and toxic exposure. Alaimo argues that because we are unable to predict, plot, or plan human health along neat categories of being, environmentally minded citizens and scholars must accept new methods of resolving risk that are overtly uncertain, partial, and collaborative. Her concept of trans-corporeality as an ethic aligns with Ulrich Beck’s claim that “the determination of risk is itself a form of ethics,” requiring the deliberate symbiosis of “everyday and expert rationality” (21). In its agile assessment of risks posed to human and nonhuman life using creative, hybridized strategies of academic engagement, Alaimo’s <span class="booktitle">Bodily Natures</span> explores the assembly of flows and exchanges between bodies and places that determine who humans are and who we might choose to be.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” <span class="booktitle">Material Feminisms</span>. Eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman. Indiana UP, Bloomington IN: 2008. 237-64. Print.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alaimo">Alaimo</a>, <a href="/tags/science">science</a>, <a href="/tags/environment">environment</a>, <a href="/tags/environmentalism">environmentalism</a>, <a href="/tags/body-0">body</a>, <a href="/tags/bodily">bodily</a>, <a href="/tags/bodies">bodies</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/post-human-0">post-human</a>, <a href="/tags/posthumanism">posthumanism</a>, <a href="/tags/trans-corporeal">trans-corporeal</a>, <a href="/tags/trans-corporeality">trans-corporeality</a>, <a href="/tags/race">race</a>, <a href="/tags/disability">disability</a>, <a href="/tags/disability-studies">disability studies</a>, <a href="/tags/african-american">african american</a>, <a href="/tags/west-virginia">West Virginia</a>, <a href="/tags/toxins">toxins</a>, <a href="/tags/toxic">toxic</a>, <a href="/tags/pollution">pollution</a>, <a href="/tags/ethics">ethics</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1375 at http://electronicbookreview.com